


Though I am old with wandering

by nelfes



Category: Tales of Berseria, Tales of Zestiria
Genre: Gen, hopefully this is still to your liking giftee!, the prompt was "parallel worlds with sorey and velvet" but my mind took it out of control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-28 23:02:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17191931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nelfes/pseuds/nelfes
Summary: Sorey sleeps, Velvet dreams, and time and again they meet.





	Though I am old with wandering

**Author's Note:**

> This was my part for the Tales of Secret Stana 2018. For xwhenyouwakeupx on there. Partially inspired by the Berseria novel epilogue / the Zestiria track "Throne of the God that Caused Everything".

There had been so many questions Sorey had wanted to ask Maotelus after the god had told the story of his Empyric awakening. He had grasped the dragon’s scales as if they were his moleskin and just by touch he could sketch the mirage-like images of the place called Wasteland, the organization named the Abbey, and the girl named –

“And Velvet? What happened to her then?”

The sleep is thick in his voice as he asks the question and Maotelus takes longer to answer this time. At least, Sorey thinks he does. They had both drifted off it seemed.

“Velvet,” the god repeats as if trying to grasp something. Sorey tries not to emanate concern. He had seemed so sure before, as if he still were the seraph boy in the stories.

“I loved her,” Maotelus says in a voice much more like the one Sorey remembered telling the story. “Fierce yet kind. She said she was a fool at heart, and perhaps that was true. Perhaps it is of all humans. But that is why I am here now. For Heldalf. For you.”

Sorey knows it is a delicate question, but even so,

“Is she still asleep with Innominat?”

Maotelus looks into Sorey’s eyes and for the first time it isn’t the golden brown of the sun reflected there but an iris made only of inky, black as true a color as the nightsky. He feels neither malevolence nor purity but something far more powerful, like the force at the center of a nebula.

(A flash of white, another. And then the dragon’s eyes close.)

“She must be,” he says and rests his head once more. Sorey leans against him, as he always does, and watches. The god does not stir again and Sorey does not sleep for some time.

*

Velvet dreams. At first they sync with Innominat’s like some intricate puzzle that if solved would lead to a life another woman like herself or a brother like her own could have lived.

But Laphi is only one soul in the god whose body nestles against hers now and Velvet is not that woman. She is the Lord of Calamity and even as she slumbers she remembers the choices she made and her final resolution based on equal amounts of pain and desire.

Maybe that is why when her dreams eventually separate from those of Innominat they change to scenes that seem right out of Morgrim’s books or the stories she had heard first around the hearth as a child and then later from the crew of the Van Eltia.

Their wanderlust seemed to have rubbed off on her or more likely, foolish as she is, she’s only realized now – asleep, and unaging, how many opportunities had always been just within her reach.

*

Sorey wakes to a world changed. He can feel Maotelus still asleep next to him but for the first time he can feel other things too, like the knots in his hair or his cloak bunched up beneath him.

(He runs a hand through one knot and notes that his hair is still shoulder length as if not a day has gone by.)

He closes his eyes and tries to feel the land as Maotelus had taught him. There are four points of light for each of his seraphim, shining still. When he reaches out for his squires he shivers. Alisha and Rose are not here but in their places are tens, no, hundreds of foreign presences linked to him in the way the two women once had been.

_ It worked, Mikleo, _ he thinks and very suddenly regrets turning his attention away. The lights beneath his eyelids blind him and he comes back to himself, winded.

He should sleep just a little longer. The next time he wakes he’ll be stronger.

*

Velvet Crowe joined the Abbey at sixteen or she ran off by herself and became a stowaway at eighteen, or she kissed Niko at thirteen and,

And, Velvet wonders, in the way dreamers do, why none of these paths continue into her old age.

She sees Celica as a grandmother. The lines on her face catch the excess tears that stream down into her niece’s cradle. She embraces the baby girl with one arm and Laphi with the other because who would have thought such an ill boy could grow up to be a fine young man, much less bear children of his own.

It is not as if Velvet isn’t present in stories that go like this. She is, but the image always blurs. The scene always switches to something, somewhere else.

That is the problem with dreams. If you cannot imagine it, it cannot happen and Velvet had never thought of herself past twenty. Her summer-filled days in Abal had seemed endless – that is, until the Scarlet Night, until Titania.

But in her dreams she does not always end up there. Once out hunting she meets Magilou, just a girl herself then, and shows her the best places to hide in the forest when a group of men come after her. Summer lives on in tales like those.

In others she still becomes a daemon and in still more, she kills them. Sometimes she murders as she once did for her own reasons, other times for the Abbey’s justice. Always it is to protect that fluttering, incandescent feeling inside her she calls a heart.

She sees Oscar and Theresa as well as Eleanor in dreams like these, but none stay long with her. Instead, it is an exorcist she has never seen before who approaches her as she stands over the body of an orc that once was man.

“There has to be another way,” he says and when she looks into his leafgreen eyes she somehow feels less alone.

“There isn’t,” she tells him even so. “If there had been Arthur would not have ordered it.”

*

When he wakes again he spends a long time just looking at the lights. Zaveid’s has dimmed some but every once in a while there is a crackle of energy and Sorey can practically hear the man’s boisterous laughter.  Lailah burns as hot, and white and bright as never before and together she and Edna create a tapestry greater than any constellation he has ever seen.

Mikleo’s is gentle and tempting and Sorey feels his pull as the moon feels the tides, but when Sorey finally stands up he does not travel in the direction of Aroundight.

There is another forest he can see now in the same way he senses the earthpulse as a double to the grainy topsoil beneath his feet. It has lain there since long before the Mabinogio Ruins, climbing up the precipice he now stands on, once magnificent– now the broken throne of a long forgotten god. It is covered in thorns and brambles and flowers of the palest pink.

For a moment he hesitates at the crossroads between the two woods but he remembers Gramps saying that even paths long separated might become one again with time. Sorey is unsure how much time he has now that the world has begun to turn once more for him - albeit in fits and starts - but he has never been one to turn down an invitation.

And inside the thicket he knows there is someone he would very much like to meet.

*

Her time in Titania varies with each turn of the tale. At times, she has company and others she makes sure it is her alone in the pit. When there is someone visiting her there in the dark it is often the exorcist with green eyes – sometimes as another prisoner, but more often as a guard.

When he is standing over her, he says:

“You can have no place in the new world we are creating. I am sorry; Velvet, but you know how the people without resonance across the land would feel about you. So for the sake of your family and the many outside these walls we need you to stay here.”

Her reaction never differs from the times those words are his own to when they are Arthur's. The words always hit hard as she remembers the people of Abal (dead by her hand or casting her out but always, in any number of tales, always afraid) and she swallows the bitter taste down again.

*

“What do you want from us?”

He finds her not in the midst of the thicket at the heart of the forest but sitting on a stone tablet that rests high on a rocky outcropping. Her legs are tucked beneath her and upon her lap rests a sleeping boy. Her left arm is obscured supporting him but the other strokes his hair in time to the rise and fall of the boy’s chest as she regards Sorey.

For the first time he wonders if he should not have come here.

“I wanted to see you,” he confesses. When she does not respond he tilts his head. “Did you not want to see me?”

“Not really. Not while I was awake.”

Sorey gazes up at her for one moment more before accepting this. He sighs and leans back against one of the stones supporting the tablet. He hadn’t realized how out of shape his slumber had left him before deciding to make his way here. His breathing is uneven and he regards the tear in his gloves with some wonder. The shallow cut there glistens red.

(His cloak has not fared the thorns much better and it hangs in at least three pieces off his back).

“I don’t know if I can go back anymore,” he notes after a silence. If he is referring to Elsyia or Maotelus, his friends or his promise, he can no longer tell. The view at the top of the world seems very lonely to him all of a sudden and the trek back through the thicket treacherous.

“Then don’t go back,” he hears her chide. “Just keep going forward with what strength you have left.”

He laughs because somewhere, somehow he knows they have had this conversation before.

“Okay,” he says and stands up.

*

Velvet regards the man’s outstretched hand with a baffled expression.

“You know what will happen if I climb down there, don’t you?”

The man,  _ the Shepherd _ she thinks with subdued acknowledgement, gives her a small smile.

“I’m not sure I do,” he says without ever lowering his hand. “When I went to rest with Maotelus I thought we would both wake at the same time and go see the world together but I’ve come to realize the seraphim, or the malakhim, or the Empyreans  - whatever you’d like to call them, their flow of time is a bit different from ours.”

It’s odd, Velvet thinks. That single statement seems to hold more unshed tears than anything in her kaleidoscopic memories of him. Not even when burying the orc with her or struggling against Titania’s metal walls had he sounded so weary.

“Their powers are too,” he continues. “I mean you’re supposed to be just like him right,” he notes and nods to sleeping Innominat. “But you’re awake now and talking to me. Why’s that?”

“Because someone decided to stick their nose where it doesn’t belong.”

He laughs again and it is just as full of life as his tearful voice had been.

“Well, I think we were meant to meet.”

Velvet looks away then. This Shepherd does not sound like any she has ever met, nor does he appear as young as he once did. When she meets his gaze once more she sees the turn of the seasons in his eyes and lets herself wonder for a moment what it would be like to experience those again in her own skin.

“If I let go of Laphi,”’ she begins and hates the way her voice sounds as she speaks her brother’s name. She regards him as if expecting a correction or some sign of resistance but he sleeps on. “If I do that then the world will truly end.”

The Shepherd shakes his head once more. “No. Maotelus, I mean Laphicet - he won’t let that happen.”

There is another long silence between them and unlike during her slumber she  can feel each second slip under her skin like tiny slivers of wood.

“I don’t deserve it,” she manages.

“Maybe,” the Shepherd says easily. “Maybe not in your opinion. But he thinks so, I can tell. And you trust him don’t you?”

The hand is there for her to grab still.

She takes the chance Phi has given her.

*

“I’m Sorey by the way,” he says as he stoops to detach his earring from the lowhanging thisle it had caught on. Velvet rolls her eyes and sheathes her gauntlet blade. She’s really quite more effective at navigating the place than he is and not just because of her equipment.

Still, they are both making progress and as Sorey pockets the two elysalark feathers he feels younger almost. This isn’t so different from another ruins expedition. All except for own part of course, but he keeps that longing to the back of his mind for now. Soon enough, he thinks.

His cloak is gone now, perhaps for the best as it’s really no longer his mantle to wear. He had given some of the less tattered parts to Velvet for her left shoulder. She had asked if he had any bandages, but well the cloak had had to do.

“I’m not shaking your hand again,” she says and it’s a relief she isn’t commenting on his slow speed. He cannot even tell if the woman beside him is winded at all.

“Heh, sorry. Just thought formal introductions both ways was only fair.”

“Fair,” she repeats and the look on her face is the first unguarded one he’s seen since they began their journey downward. “You really are a strange one.”

“Wait until you hear what my friends have to say. I’m sure they won’t disagree. Edna always called me-”

Velvet hacks another thornbush from their path and they both pause. The sun sets over Lakehaven Heights far below them and for the first time they have the entire sky spooled out before them.

“I don’t need to hear,” Velvet says, profile illuminated by the gentle fire of the sun below her. “I’ll go see for myself.”


End file.
